Interview: Middle Class Rut - Unshackled Justice

Since forming in 2006, Middle Class
Rut—which consists solely of guitarist/vocalist Zack Lopez and drummer/vocalist
Sean Stockham—has carved out a reputation
as being one of the most bombastic
duos on the scene. Their latest release, Pick
up Your Head, looks beyond the confines of
the duo configuration and takes an “anything
goes” approach. During the recording,
layers of additional colors—like bass parts,
Morello-esque Whammy-pedal quirks, and
percussive splashes—were spontaneously
added as the album evolved. The result is a
fresher, fuller sound for MC Rut.

Faced with the prospect of having to
recreate a larger sound when touring in
support of the new album, MC Rut had to
find a new game plan for their live shows.
“It’s a whole lot easier with just two people,
on one hand, but it limits you on another,”
says Lopez. Both he and Stockham were
vehemently opposed to laptops or sequencers,
so the other option was to hire additional
musicians. Although they’ve flirted
with having help onstage before, adding
new members to the fray was not a decision
they took lightly.

Scars remain from what happened with
Leisure, Lopez and Stockham’s previous
band, which was signed to DreamWorks Records in 2000 but then saw its dream
quickly turn to nightmare. “We just
couldn’t find the right dynamic with
other people,” Lopez recalls. “We’d spend
a couple of years building a thing with a
singer, and then it would fall apart and we’d
have to start over again. It was a revolving
door of people—we had six different singers
by the end of it. We were the only two
consistent members, and we swapped a lot
of people out up until our early 20s. It took
us a long time to realize that maybe this
wasn’t going to happen with other people.”
Leisure disbanded in 2003, and Lopez and
Stockham were so burnt and jaded from the
experience that they both abandoned music
and found day jobs—Lopez became a construction
worker and Stockham became a
studio runner.

After about three years, the two realized
they much preferred power chords to
power tools and teamed up again. This time
around, however, they were adamant about
not repeating the same mistakes. “When
we got back together, we knew we couldn’t
look for a singer because we’d end up in
the same boat. We decided that we’d try
our hand at it ourselves,” says Lopez. “We
figured the only way it would work is if we
didn’t have to involve anyone else. Instead
of trying to convey your ideas to someone
to hear what you want to hear, you just
do it yourself. I don’t know why it took so
long to come to that realization. It took a
lot to find the confidence to decide that we
can do everything from start to finish, but
once we did, everything became a thousand
times easier.”

Thus Middle Class Rut was born and
signed to Bright Antenna Records after their
song “New Low” was picked up by several
radio stations, including the now-defunct
Sacramento station KWOD. The song hit
No. 5 on alternative radio and got more
than 4 million hits on YouTube. In 2010,
MC Rut’s demo was released as No Name
No Color, an album that garnered the band
serious buzz as the next big thing. They’ve
since shared the stage with the likes of Alice
in Chains, Linkin Park, Papa Roach, and
Weezer. SXSW 2013 marked the debut of
the band’s new touring lineup for its just-released
sophomore effort, Pick up Your
Head, which adds another guitarist, a bassist,
and a dude bangin’ away on automotive
parts. “It’s so much easier now,” says Lopez.
“Before I would stress out, like, ‘How am
I going to do this?’ Now there’s actually
another human I can play with. We’re going
to be bringing out older stuff that we can
now do. It opens up more doors.”

That newfound freedom hasn’t just
made it possible to do older material previously
deemed too difficult to pull of as a
duo—it’s completely rejuvenated the band in its preparation for the Uproar Tour this fall with Alice in Chains, Jane's Addiction, and Coheed and Cambria.
“We’ve got a new excitement that we didn’t
have before,” says Lopez. “We were pretty
fried at the end of the last record—on touring,
on everything. But at the show we did
a couple of weeks ago, it felt like, “Holy
shit—this is fun again in a way it hasn’t
been in a while!”

New York City native Joe Charupakorn is a guitarist, author, and editor. He has interviewed the world’s biggest guitar icons including Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Yngwie Malmsteen, Carlos Santana, Neal Schon, and Dave Davies, among many others, for Premier Guitar. Additionally, he has written over 20 instructional books for Hal Leonard Corporation. His books are available worldwide and have been translated into many languages. Visit him on the web at joecharupakorn.com.

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